I cannot help you trace your smuggling
ancestors, and I will not reply to your email if you
ask me to do so. If you want to find your roots, please click
here to go to a page that is designed to help you.

If you have another question about smuggling, you may
find the answer in books listed in the bibliography.

I wrote the text for this site more than 15 years ago
and I no longer have my notes.

Here is my email address (sorry, it's not clickable. You
have to retype it):

The site is based ona book, The Ordnance Survey
Guide to Smugglers' Britain, which was published by Cassell in 1991.
This site is not connected in any way with the Ordnance Survey or Cassell
Publishers. The book is out of print, but I have recently completed another
similar book, Smuggling in the British Isles which you can buy
by clicking here.

Places mentioned on the website are not necessarily open
to the public unless the text explicitly states this; access and opening
times may have changed since the text was written. Any exploration of
the places mentioned on these web pages is entirely at your own risk:
I take no responsibility if you fall off a cliff or get trapped in a sea-cave.

I took all reasonable steps to ensure that Smugglers'
Britain contained no factual errors. If you alert me to mistakes,
I will change the site - usually within a week.

I own the copyright on many of the
images reproduced on this website. I am happy to supply hi-res scans of
them for reproduction, or for film or broadcast. I make a charge for commercial
use to recoup the cost of keeping the site up and running. There is no
charge for other uses (listed above and defined at the bottom of the page),
as long as you include a link to this site.

The Author, Richard Platt

I am a full-time author, and I have written more than
100 (mostly) non-fiction books.You can read more about me
and my writing by clicking
here.

I have done TV and radio
interviews on smuggling or piracy for: Meridian, BBC, ITV, the Discovery
Channel and many local stations. I worked as a costume consultant
for the Disney feature film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's
Chest. In the window on the left you can watch a short
interview I recorded for the BBC's Heaven & Earth Show.
It was broadcast February 2006.

Smugglers' Britain was my first book on a maritime
subject, but the sea has become a recurring theme: I have since written
several books on piracy, men-of-war, and shipwrecks:

Cassells
published Smuggler's Britain, on which this site is based, in 1991

Man-of-War
was the second of seven cross-section books that Stephen Biesty and
I produced for Dorling Kindersley

Pirate,
part of Dorling Kindersley's successful Eyewitness series

Chris Riddell
won a Kate Greenaway medal for his stunning illustrations in Walker
Book's Pirate Diary

I contributed
a chapter on the Mediterranean corsairs to this adult title on pirates
for Salamander

Another
Eyewitness title published by Dorling Kindersley in 1997

Having problems?

If bigger pictures don't pop up when you click the smaller
version on the page, you may have to disable a pop-up blocker that stops
unwanted adverts appearing in your browser. I have made limited use of
Javascript on this site. If things don't work as they should, make sure
Javascript is enabled in your browser's preferences.
If maps don't appear, your browser may not be compatible with Google maps:
click
here to see which browsers are supported.
Finally, let me know if something isn't working.

More about this site

The explosion of import smuggling that took place in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been absorbed into the public
consciousness leaving only the vaguest of traces. The smugglers gave us
phrases such as ‘on the spot’ and ‘the coast is clear’,
yet they remain, at least in most people’s minds, shadowy, romantic
figures. I became interested in this period of Britain’s history
while researching a popular magazine article on the subject, and though
I found the story fascinating, I was surprised and disappointed to discover
that there were no books in print on smuggling. The Ordnance Survey
Guide to Smugglers’ Britain was an attempt to remedy this situation.

Choosing sources

In researching the book, I read many volumes that purported
to be histories of smuggling. In reality, most of them were histories
of the prevention of smuggling, or of the customs and excise services.
This is perfectly understandable: historians prefer to work from primary
sources whenever possible, and by the very nature of the game, smugglers
left few accurate and detailed records of their activities. Their adversaries
in the service of the Crown were, by contrast, prolific correspondents,
and in the public record office at Kew there are hundreds of thousands
of letters and other documents that deal with the minutiae of life in
the country’s custom houses. I am not a historian, and early on
I came to the conclusion that the story of smuggling is far more interesting
than the story of its prevention. I therefore tried whenever possible
to write about smuggling from the point of view of those who broke the
law, not those who enforced it.

Yarns and hearsay

To find this perspective, I left the carefully-paved and
reliable road of official revenue records. I branched off onto the muddy
and rutted paths of traditional yarns, folk tales, and recollections of
the oldest inhabitant. I hope the result will please those who are fascinated
by tales of smuggling and smugglers. It will certainly appeal to those
who wish to follow in the footsteps of the men and women who profited
from Britain’s punitive taxation laws. By the same token, this site
may well irritate historians. I have shamelessly included a great deal
of hearsay and many unverified assertions, and for the sake of clarity,
I have used a few revenue terms — such as ‘preventive’
— in a rather loose way.

Scepticism

This is not to say that I have accepted as fact every
yarn I heard and read. On the contrary, I have more often tended towards
scepticism. For example, if every story I've quoted about a smugglers’
tunnel was true, the coast of southern England would resemble Swiss cheese,
and most cliffs would collapse into the sea. If a story seemed plausible,
I’ve said so.

Scope

In the course of my research, I visited and photographed
most of the places on the British mainland and the Isle of Wight about
which I have written. The exceptions are the most remote areas, and those
where I found little evidence of smuggling. Specifically, I stayed south
and east of a line drawn between Stranraer and Inverness, and I omitted
most of the west coast between Liverpool and Carlisle.

Acknowledgements

I received an enormous amount of help in writing Smugglers'
Britain, but I am indebted to a few people in particular.

The staff of the British Library, then still at Bloomsbury,
helped me track down hundreds of obscure references, and branch librarians
all over the country responded to my letters with photocopies of their
local archives. The staff of the Customs and Excise Library at King’s
Beam House helped me in the early stages of my research.

Ilford Ltd generously provided me with film with which
to shoot the colour pictures.

Robin Wood provided some early
encouragement.

Many thanks also to...

Blue Circle Heritage Trust

Flat Holm Project

Foulkes-Halbard of Filching

Margate Caves

Parham Park

Post Office Postcode Services

The Three Daws Inn, Gravesend

The many people who allowed a complete stranger to photograph their
homes, and who shared their knowledge of the smuggling trade

The friends who provided meals and beds during my travels, and endured
my countless smuggling yarns!

[Back
to text]
DEFINITIONS If you are in any doubt about whether or not your proposed use
falls into one of these categories, then it probably doesn't. I am sorry
I have to include all this nonsense, but it seems that in their eagerness
to avoid paying a small reproduction fee, some publishers willfully misunderstand
the blindingly obvious. So just to make this absolutely clear...

Charity means a registered charity.

Non-profit means an organisation
that does not aim to make a profit. It doesn't mean a business that has
not yet made a profit, but aims to do so in the future.

Private purposes means use in a family,
home or social context. If the picture or text are reproduced, then the
number of copies is dozens, not hundreds.

Educational purposes means that: you
are a member of staff or a student at an educational institution such
as a school or college; that you use the picture or text solely
as part of your work within that institution; and if the picture or
text are reproduced in a publication, that publication does not have significant
circulation outside of the educational institution.